Who We Are Now: On Ellen Ullman’s By Blood

Related Books:

It wasn’t so long ago that critics were wondering whether the Holocaust could sustain a serious literature of its own after all the original survivors were gone. Primo Levi, Jerzy Kosiński, Paul Celan — all survivors — had written such penetrating, personal accounts of the Holocaust that many questioned whether it was necessary, even morally responsible, to write novelistic accounts second-hand. To be sure, it wasn’t that writers were afraid to try. It was that the many who did often failed miserably. Yet over the past decade, we have seen novelists like Jonathan Safran Foer, with his poignant debut Everything Is Illuminated and Michael Chabon, with The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, breath new life into genre that once seemed either too sacred or too remote to touch.

Ellen Ullman’s psychologically complex and deeply serious new novel, By Blood, doesn’t break the stratosphere of a Foer or Chabon novel, but it does come close. She creates a heart-pounding narrative that circles around an adopted American woman living in 1970s San Francisco, referred to only as “the patient.” Told through a series of psychiatry sessions, which are eavesdropped upon by our narrator — a ghoulish classics professor escaping a murky past of his own — we learn that the patient was raised by a privileged Roman Catholic family, only to discover in adulthood that her real mother is Jewish. And not just any Jew: a highly cultured and assimilated German who finds herself in the maw of Bergen-Belsen.

The mother, later renamed Michal, suffers all the grisly horrors we’ve come to expect from Holocaust narratives. She is raped repeatedly by a Nazi guard, and even at the camp’s liberation, she is nearly shot to death in a battle that breaks out between Jewish Zionists and the former Nazi guards. Devastated by the horrors she’s experienced, Michal gives up her daughter, the patient — whose father may be a Nazi rapist, or perhaps a Zionist hero — to a Roman Catholic adoption agency in the hope that the daughter will escape a Jewish identity entirely. When the patient tracks down Michal years later and confronts her about her adoption, Michal, now living in Israel, responds bluntly: “I wanted to make sure you would not be a Jew.”

In a relatively short book, Ullman manages to pick up a very large, and mixed, bag of a Jewish inheritance. We hear not only about the heroics of Zionist fighters, but also their failure to follow through — one charismatic leader both unifies the Jews in the camp, only to abscond to Switzerland with stolen money. There is also a Jewish doctor who, despite establishing the fact that the death camps existed in a post-war trial, also admits to having kept herself alive by helping Dr. Mengele experiment on Jews. Yet despite Michal’s own generally grim view of Jewish history, there are moments of unquestionable triumph. In one of the novel’s most poignant scenes, we hear Michal, at last, embrace her Jewish identity at the sound of Bergen-Belsen survivors singing the “Hatikva,” which would become the national anthem of Israel. “I thought: Who are these people?” Michal recounts to her daughter:

What sort of people have such determination and courage, even before all the dead have found their graves? What was giving them such strength, such hope? And the tears ran do my face, this time not with joy but with regret, and heartbreak, and longing…You see, said Michal: At that moment, and for the first time in my life, I wanted to be a Jew.

Scenes like these can be quite moving, but they can also feel like an abridged history of 20th century Jewry. So much of Ullman’s narrative is nestled around the defining issues of Jewish life in the last 100 years — whether Israel is a blessing or burden; what role the Holocaust should play in Jewish identity; the question of assimilation — that you can forget that Judaism has had another 3,000 years of history that has sustained it. Of course, it could be argued that, in the novel’s obliviousness to that longer past, it gives a more accurate depiction of how many Jews today with only a shaky knowledge of their heritage — that is, Jews like the patient — understand Jewish identity. But with a novel so learned about Jewish history (after reading several passages of Ullman’s Holocaust narrative, I was fascinated to learn that much of it was true), you wish that she would have expanded her set of Jewish identity markers. Instead, Ullman has left us with a highly circumscribed view of Jewish identity — defined solely by the nodes of the Holocaust, Israel, and assimilation.

Ullman’s novel isn’t only about Jewish identity. It is the lens through which Ullman explores a larger question: what role should blood-heritage play in anyone’s sense of self? It is here that the structure of her novel — told through talk therapy sessions, and a creepy professor who doubts the psychiatrist’s motives — makes perfect sense. For the psychiatrist, Dr. Dora Schussler, we are given a classic Freudian view of self-understanding. Only through digging up one’s repressed memories from childhood, Dr. Schussler suggests to the patient, can she finally solve all her young adulthood issues — her lesbianism, her chilly relationship with her adopted mother, her constant drive to succeed (she is already a successful financial analyst). Yet since all this is mediated through the professor, whose office sits next to Dr. Schussler’s, there is the constant undercurrent of doubt cast over Schussler’s theory. “Irreparable harm!” the professor shouts to himself at one point, as he eavesdrops on one of Dr. Schussler’s sessions. “How dare you do irreparable harm to my beloved patient!”

This tug-of-war between the professor and Dr. Schussler serves Ullman’s purposes on several levels. Both characters have their own psychological baggage, thus denying us the certainty that any one character is right. In addition to the professor’s expulsion from his university, perhaps for sexual misconduct with his students, Dr. Schussler is herself German, and is quite possibly is using the patient to expiate for “the sins of my own Nazi bastard father,” as she says at one point. But by setting the novel well after the Holocaust itself, in 1970s San Francisco, Ullman has also employed a critical narrative device that has enabled the Holocaust novel to survive, even flourish, well beyond the survivor-written testaments. The Holocaust is quickly becoming something no writer will have ever had direct experience with. So rather than create simple works of historical fiction, fashioning narratives set solely in war-ravaged Europe, Ullman, like Chabon and Foer, has ushered in a fecund new phase of Holocaust fiction. It is not only necessary that we try to recapture the morally-starved world of the actual Holocaust — something Ullman has done extraordinarily well — but that we take up the question of how much that bleak history should define our present-day lives.

Ullman is savvy enough an author to avoid giving a definitive answer, but she does offer some quite plausible ones. When the patient, tormented over the issue of who her real father is — a killer, or hero — asks Dr. Schussler for advice, she answers: “What does it matter which one your father is?” “Yes,” the patient answers, “But you can’t help but thinking. Can’t help but wonder who he was.” To which Dr. Schussler responds:

Of course…You will always think about it and wonder over it. It is part of your history, and quite an unusual history at that. I imagine you will tell many stories about it as you meet people over the course of your life. But I don’t think you necessarily have to feel too much about it, if you understand my distinction.

I think I do [says the patient].

It is an interesting and distinctive fact about you, but says nothing—

In 2010, the Whitney Biennial made history when, for the first time, over half (52 percent) of its featured artists were women. In 2012, the numbers returned to their typical proportions, with women representing roughly 35 percent of all artists. At this year’s biennial, about 32 percent of the artists represented are women. What's most frustrating about these numbers is that they haven’t changed much since the mid-nineties, when the Guerilla Girls first charted gender bias.
I looked up these statistics while reading Siri Hustvedt’s new novel, The Blazing World, which is set in the New York art world and tells the story of Harriet Burden, an accomplished, middle-aged artist so frustrated by her lack of stature that she arranges for three younger male artists to show her work as their own. Burden believes her artwork will be better received if exhibited by young men, rather than an aging widow. It’s an experiment of sorts, an artwork in and of itself, which she calls Maskings. At the end of the experiment, she plans to reveal herself as the true artist. In her journal, Burden calls it her “fairy tale”:
There will be three masks, just as in the fairy tales. Three masks of different hues and countenances, so that the story will have its perfect form. Three masks, three wishes, always three. And the story will have bloody teeth.
Unfortunately for Burden, her fairy tale has an unhappy ending, and instead of merely revealing the art world’s biases she ends up discovering some unpleasant truths about her own life. Of the three artists she works with, only one plays his part and remains friendly with her after their collaboration. The other two betray her, one breaking off contact, and the other disavowing their relationship — and then dying. Burden does not live long enough to set the record straight and dies with an uncertain reputation.
To back up a bit, Burden’s story, and the story of Maskings in particular, is presented as a scholarly work, a posthumous study of a controversial artist. Instead of a straightforward biography, the work is an anthology of interviews with people close to Burden, articles and reviews about Maskings, excerpts from Burden’s journals, and other miscellaneous writings, including experimental fiction from Burden’s son. The anthology is edited and footnoted by a professor of aesthetics, who describes Maskings as a work “meant not only to expose the antifemale bias of the art world, but to uncover the complex workings of human perception and how unconscious ideas about gender, race, and celebrity influence a viewer’s understanding of a given work of art.” The professor/editor also explains the origin of the title, The Blazing World, which is taken from a utopian fiction by Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. Cavendish is one of Burden’s many intellectual fascinations, a sixteenth-century writer and thinker whose work went unrecognized in her time.
Are you still with me? With the exception of the journal excerpt, almost all of the information I have conveyed so far is revealed in the first five pages of this abundant (and sometimes too abundant) puzzle of a novel. I was game for the challenge, but there were times when the format was wearying and I became frustrated with the uneven narration. But by the end of the novel, I felt the anthology format was the most authentic way to present Burden’s life. She wasn’t someone the culture took interest in, so it stands to reason that the information remaining upon her death would be fragmentary, inconsistent, and unrealized.
So who was Harriet Burden? Who did she love? What was she like? What did she think about? What were her worries? Her pleasures? These were the questions that ended up interesting me more than the actual machinations of the plot, which center around Burden’s three-part artwork, Maskings, and the fates of the men Burden colluded with. Some of this has to do, I think, with the difficulty of rendering visual artworks in prose. Hustvedt has written about contemporary art as a journalist and critic (as well as in a previous novel, What I Loved) and she conjures up Burden’s sculptures and installations with wit and authority. But there is still a huge imaginative gap between reading about an artwork and seeing it in person — one that doesn’t exist, I think, when describing people, places, or things. I often felt an intellectual connection to Burden’s ambitious installations, but not an emotional one.
Another reason I lost interest in the Maskings plotline was simply that Harriet Burden (“Harry”, to her friends) is a complicated, lively character, more fully drawn than her male masks. As I got to know her as a mother and grandmother, a friend, a partner, and finally, a patient, I became less interested in her elaborate plan to unseat the art world. Maybe it’s inevitable for the personal to overwhelm the political in a novel, but it also has to do with the way Hustvedt shifts the story from one of ambition to an intimate portrait of a family gathering around a dying woman. Burden’s final journal entries portray an artist still raging against those who underestimated her, but they also reveal a nostalgic mother, a mournful child, and a woman still searching for self-knowledge. Crucially, her final entries reveal Burden’s changing relationship to her body as she succumbs to death. Her thoughts return to the birth of her children: “Birth, like illness, and like death, is not willed. It simply happens. The ‘I’ has nothing to do with it.”
Female bodies and images of birth are a recurring motif in Burden’s artworks, an irony that doesn’t escape Burden, a woman who employs male bodies to represent her work. One of her final sculptures portrays a woman giving birth to letters and numbers and hundreds of little people. It’s inspired by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Burden’s spiritual mother. Burden includes a tiny self-portrait of herself among Cavendish’s progeny, one that is discovered by an art world outsider in the novel’s final pages. It’s the last view we get of Burden, a hopeful wink to anyone who cares to look closely at her legacy.

Whenever Ferrante is forced to communicate about her work, her communication is laced with an intense self-surveillance. The book is restrained and self-protective, and I find myself protective of her as well.

Arturo, don’t give Foer that much credit. He’s more like Michael Bay – all style, no substance. Anyway the author must have been referring to something other than literary merit, I’m sure nobody takes a guy who turned 9/11 into a cartoon flipbook seriously.

Mengele gets the usual mention, yet few link up his reputation known to the history books with that revealed if you google his name with Monarch Programming. Years ago I researched Monarch Programming, didn’t intend to but once at that point in the maze I had to make sense of it. Before I published I was visited by , well, you can guess who, but I checked Mengele’s disposition then (dead) and description, (5 foot 8 inches) and my man was alive and shorter. I could rest. I did nothing. Until last year. Last year in May I noticed all the motifs, cues and triggers allegedly from the Program in the mainstream media, and since then three comments or emails a day like this comment seek recognition the threat persisted albeit one perhaps hopes, for the Western intel people. I still seek corroboration Mengele was very much alive , after 1979. Did he live in Mougins?
USA, Canada, Switzerland, The West, England? Now we know what he looked like, with his thick accent, it is time to reverse engineer his time on this planet and who like me he touched, and why. And his speciality, what he had always been doing, was creating trauma, the more bizzarre the better, for Monarch Programming relies on trauma. Sorry. It does. Mengele did have an agenda now relived from celluloid prompts in the mass media for unknown numbers being kept in CHECK!

@Bob, I enjoyed the additional mediation of the eavesdropper as Narrator.

It allowed for a more layered understanding of the Patient (and a more critical view of the Psychiatrist), and (for my own pleasure as a San Franciscan) a more personalized characterization of the various elements of my city.

Parallel Botany uniquely suited for rereading in the age of the Trump administration’s "alternative facts," as it spans the gap between art and science, showing how disregard for the truth equally imperils both the studio and the laboratory.